Episode 816: … He Bought a Food Blog With 1,500 Posts—Here’s What Happened Next With Jason Decker

EBT816 – Jason Decker

Intro 00:00

Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth, and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom. Whether that’s financial, personal, or professional. I’m Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

[00:01] Megan Porta

Jason, welcome. It’s so nice to meet you. How are you today?

[00:05] Jason Decker

Thanks, Megan. I appreciate it. This is an incredible opportunity, and I’m just grateful for you bringing me on.

[00:12] Megan Porta

Yay! Well, you have such a great story to talk about today, and I’m excited to get into it. But just give us a little background — who are you and what do you do?

[00:20] Jason Decker

Sure. I’m Jason Decker. I’m an expert in audit automation — I put audits on autopilot. I’m a cancer survivor, a father, an entrepreneur. After 26 years in the automotive industry, I had cancer, I went through a divorce, and I lost my job. It all reset my life. My dream was always to work alongside my daughters, Maddie and Lizzie, and my plan was to do that through the automotive industry — by buying a dealership. But God’s plan was a lot different than my plan, and that’s when This Silly Girl’s Kitchen came in, which is my blog.

I found there was another way to invest my time with my family, because one thing we always loved growing up — the one thing we could always agree on, and I’m sure you can attest to this with your kids — was cooking shows. My kids and I loved them. So that was what we always rallied around. When the opportunity came up to buy a business, This Silly Girl’s Kitchen kind of fell in our lap. It had originally been on an SBA loan that fell through with another buyer, so it was offered to my mentor.

When it was brought to me, the first thing I thought of was my daughters — going back to those days where we’d sit on the couch for hours watching Guy’s Grocery Games. I told them, “Hey, what do you guys think about this?” And one thing about kids is they always want to be a YouTube star, so when I told them about it they said, “Dad, we’re all in. Let’s go.” It was fun — we started making videos together and making recipes.

That was what we built everything around — just family. For me, after spending years working countless hours, it gave me an opportunity to re-engage with my daughters. It’s the biggest gift I’ve ever been given in my entire life, because the conversations I’ve been able to have with my daughters — the depth of those conversations — I could never put a price tag on. That’s why I say I’m the most blessed person on the planet.

[01:54] Megan Porta

Yeah. Nice, I love it.

[02:41] Megan Porta

What a great story, my gosh. So how old are your daughters?

[02:46] Jason Decker

My oldest is 18, and actually — in two days, on Thursday — I’m taking her to college. That’s hard. I’m sitting here right now just thinking about it. That’s my baby. I gave her her first bottle, her first everything, and now she’s going to college. I feel like I blinked.

[03:10] Megan Porta

Yeah, I know, I know — we have teenagers too. Ours are boys, but it’s heartbreaking. I can’t even go there yet, but I feel for you. How cool, though — I just love the story. So you purchased This Silly Girl’s Kitchen — that’s the name of the blog — and you did that recently, in January of this year, correct?

[03:30] Jason Decker

Yes. January 21st was day one. And I’ll tell you, from day one it was just drinking through a fire hose, switching industries.

[03:44] Megan Porta

Yeah, I bet. And coming into an industry that’s kind of shifting itself, I bet you felt so much overwhelm. But I bet it’s been a fun journey too, just learning the ins and outs of food blogging.

[03:59] Jason Decker

It’s been an incredible journey — I can’t tell you how blessed I am. And it’s been the people, like yourself, Andrew over at NerdPress, Casey Marquis was enormous — I know we’ll get into that more, his audit was a true game changer for me. He threw me into the deep end of the pool I needed to learn in.

And then, obviously, Dana DeVolk, the founder — she was just absolutely incredible. She really took me under her wing during the transition, because it’s her baby. She grew it from day one, and she wants it to succeed and do even better than she had it. She’s been incredible in making this transition as easy as possible.

[04:52] Megan Porta

That’s so great. So how did this come onto your radar? How did you decide, “I’m going to purchase this blog”?

[05:01] Jason Decker

Sure. So, about this time last year, I was deciding — you know what, I need to change. I’d been in the car business for 26 years. I needed to, because my parents were getting older, my kids were getting older, and time is something we don’t have much of — we have to invest it as much as we can. My parents were getting older; my dad had a stroke, he was in and out of the hospital, and I wanted to be there for every appointment I could.

And then, again, repairing my relationship with my daughters — because I’d gone through a divorce — what was most important to me was finding something we could all do together. That’s where This Silly Girl’s Kitchen came in. It’s interesting: what I wanted was to have my daughters work with me, and I always thought that would be through the auto industry — again, my plan. And This Silly Girl’s Kitchen came into our life instead.

My kids always wanted to be on YouTube — we used to make videos of them when they were really young, creating different recipes. This was our opportunity. So, like I said, it was the biggest gift we’ve ever had. Once it came up and I explained it to my daughters, it was a complete no-brainer to move forward.

[06:29] Megan Porta

So how did it come up? You were in the automotive industry — you weren’t in the blogging industry. So how did it come onto your radar?

[06:38] Jason Decker

Good question. A friend of mine was talking to me about buying cash-flowing businesses — more traditional brick-and-mortar, really bright guy. About a week and a half later, he recommended a couple of people I could follow, podcast-wise. So I started following them, and I learned a lot. I thought, okay, this is definitely something I can do. He recommended I do something online, because you don’t have the brick-and-mortar part of it — the barriers to entry are a lot less.

I ended up working with a company called ARM Five, and I met my mentor, who’s now my business partner — he’s absolutely incredible. Talk about another gift from God — my partner Jeff is one of the brightest people I’ve ever met. He vetted everything for me. I could have done a done-for-you deal where he took care of everything, but I did it with him, every part of it, because I wanted to learn. So we vetted probably eight or nine companies — went through P&Ls, bank statements, you name it, marrying it all up. And, like I said, This Silly Girl’s Kitchen came onto our radar. We went through all the books, everything from years past. I look at it as God’s biggest gift to me, because it fit every single box I wanted. And on top of that, my daughters were all in. So for me, it was it.

[08:32] Megan Porta

Okay. So you and your partner decided to dig in, and your daughters too. So what did that first stretch look like? Were you just thrown into the deep end? Did it make sense? I’m curious what you were going through in your mind.

[08:52] Jason Decker

You hit every nail on the head. Yeah, it was definitely drinking through a giant fire hose, in that every single thing we’d talked about beforehand was falling through. What I mean by that is, I spent some time with the owner, Dana, and she was awesome going through the transition — it helped me out tremendously. What I was doing was reformatting posts; I ended up buying a bunch of recipes from her, which gave me the opportunity to learn her format for putting a blog post out, then optimizing it for SEO and all those things. It was the Karate Kid version of training yourself how to run a food blog.

It was an incredible gift to be able to learn that, but it was a lot at the front, because it was one thing after another — you’ve got to have SEO, and then learning simple things, like how to operate a plugin, the different text, headers, alt text — all these things that now, for me, are so easy to talk about. At the time, these were all foreign words. Like, I didn’t even know my own name — people would ask, “Hey, what’s your name?” and I’d be like, “Dude, I am so overwhelmed, I have no clue.”

[10:21] Megan Porta

Yeah, I bet — “I don’t know who I am,” yeah. It is an overwhelming world, isn’t it? We take it for granted, just knowing the lingo and the terms. But when you try to talk to people outside the space, they don’t know how to, say, upload a plugin. So yeah, it’s a whole new world, isn’t it?

And then how quickly did you decide to get the audit? Because it sounds like that was really helpful for you.

[10:52] Jason Decker

One hundred percent. It was incredibly helpful for me. Dana was incredible — she had a VA, and we kept her on. I asked her point blank, “How do I learn? I need to learn fast.” She said, “Hey, check out the Food Blogger Pro podcast” — that’s the one she originally recommended.

So I went in and thought, okay, what’s this all about? I saw one on SEO with Casey Marquis — it was either the first or second one I listened to. Once I did, I thought, I need this guy in my life. I sent it to my partner, he listened to it, and we both said, we’ve got to do this now. This was about two weeks into us owning the blog. I reached out to Casey, and he said sure, but it would be about two months out, because he books well in advance — he does an incredible job, very thorough. So we signed up with him, and on April 10th we did our audit. And talk about jumping from one version of drinking through a fire hose into another — I had two of them going at that point. Casey is so knowledgeable, and much like we were talking about earlier, once you have a cadence for what you’re doing daily, all the terms become second nature. For him, every word was second nature. For me, a lot of it was the first time I’d ever heard it in my life.

That was a heck of an experience — I went through the audit call, much like we’re doing now, going over what the audit was, and then I received it. It was 33 pages. And talk about overwhelm.

[13:17] Megan Porta

Yeah, those are overwhelming, agreed. So where did you go from there? You talked through it and learned what it meant and what you had to do — how long did it take you to get through it? Are you still working through it?

[13:32] Jason Decker

Great question. I was blessed in that I knew I needed to learn AI. On April 1st, I took a free course on AI, and I ended up upgrading — that was my choice 100%, because one of the things I wanted to do was use Claude. I’d heard all about it — and this is April, not that long ago. One of the things I wanted to do was take everything ChatGPT knew about me and move it over to Claude. The first thing we did in the class was exactly that, and I thought, these people know exactly what I’m looking for. After that, we built a website, and then we built an app, and I just sat there thinking, I’m getting massive value here — I’m going to upgrade. So I ended up doing a weeks-long course with a woman named Alicia Little — a great class. I definitely got thrown into the deep end of the pool; we were building all kinds of things, and it put me on the right path.

So, where the audit comes in — Casey had recommended using one of his VAs to help with the blog posts, because I had to redo all of them. The site I bought was 12 years old and had never been updated.

[15:23] Jason Decker

We knew there were opportunities, we just didn’t know how much. We had close to 1,500 blog posts, and I had to redo them all.

[15:32] Megan Porta

Wow. My gosh — that’s, okay, so add that on to the overwhelm of food blogging in general. That’s crazy. That’s a lot.

[15:45] Jason Decker

Yeah. And then on top of the 1,500 posts, there was the internal linking all the way through, the broken links — we had 800 to 900 broken links, which, as you’re well aware, when it comes to a website, means Google can’t crawl it, because it’s like a maze. That was the best analogy Casey gave me.

Your blog is like a maze, and what you’re doing is giving Google the opportunity to move through that maze like a rat. Broken links stop it from moving forward. Pop-ups stop it from moving forward. All these different things we had on the site had to be eliminated. Again, that’s 33 pages where I just sat there thinking, wow, this is a whole lot.

I ended up talking to a VA who was incredible, and we started doing some posts together. She offered to charge me $50 per post, which is actually an incredible deal, because when you’re talking about internal linking, linking back, all the pictures, all the different blocks — the E-E-A-T pieces, you name it — all of that has to be done on each blog post, plus the AI buttons, the alt text, and then actually writing the post. It’s a three-to-four-hour job per post. She let me know she could probably do two a day, and at 1,500 posts, you can do the math. If I’d had her do all of those posts and focused myself on the business side, it would have been over $70,000 — and that’s just the cost of the posts, not even counting my time. We’re talking well over six figures to get that done.

[18:12] Jason Decker

Audit complete. So that’s where automation came in.

[18:20] Megan Porta

Nice. So leaning into Claude — how did that go?

[18:26] Jason Decker

That was a heck of an experience. At first I learned how to build agents. With those agents I’d take one piece of information from the blog and move it over — I had multiple agents, everything from script writers to WordPress experts to SEO experts. I created all these different agents so I could bounce things back and forth. One of the biggest things I did was create a brand voice — I took a bunch of the posts we’d created and put all that information in, so Claude could learn everything it could about me, plus what I’d taught it moving over from ChatGPT, so that whenever we made changes or alterations to a post, it would come across in the brand voice.

I probably spent 15, 16 hours a day for almost two or three months straight, because I got obsessed with getting it right and automating it perfectly. I’d finish a post, send it to Casey, he’d go through it with a fine-tooth comb and kick it back, I’d do another one, send it again — and that’s how I built the automation. It was hundreds of hours, because there were no books, nothing written on it — it was, “guess what, you want to do this, you need to figure it out.” I was dead set on doing that, and it wasn’t until late May that I got one post done correctly. Once I did, I was able to replicate it.

[20:29] Megan Porta

Yeah, well, that’s really impressive. Okay, so how far did you get through the catalog? Are you still working through it? I mean, 1,500 is a lot of posts.

[20:33] Jason Decker

Thank you. Yeah — I did my first blog post the day after the May 25th Google update. So the 26th was my first blog post, and I was able to, in less than two months, complete and update every single blog post.

[20:51] Megan Porta

God bless. Wait, what — two months? Wow.

[21:14] Jason Decker

Yeah. And a lot of that two months was also me figuring out everything that could go wrong, because the human element in this is big. There was so much trial and error, Megan — so much. I’d try something, it would be wrong, I’d have to rebuild it, learn a new skill, put it to memory — all these things I had to keep changing and learning from. Now I’m at the point where I can look at a blog post and know everything that’s wrong with it within seconds — inputting schema, I know exactly where everything’s supposed to go, because I’ve had so much practice.

I’d do ten blog posts at a time and check every single one — one or two would be perfect, and then there’d be problems: a picture in the wrong spot, something not assigned to the right area, a block off, whatever it was. Because a big part of Casey’s audit is making sure you give your customer the ideal experience, which is where the blocks come in. So the automation evolved over time — I started with a 1.1 version, and now it’s 5.4, and each iteration was a point-one change all the way through 10.

It took me less than two months to complete the entire audit, which is also why you and I are here — because part of my audit was really leaning into E-E-A-T. So I automated a PR version of it — what I call Claudit — and it reached out to your team, and here we are today.

[23:19] Megan Porta

Wow, okay. Can you give us any nuggets about the AI streamlining you did? A lot of us are in the same boat, trying to update a lot of posts like you were — anything that would help people get through stuff like that?

[23:44] Jason Decker

One day at a time. Like I said, for me it was just learning, learning, learning, and being obsessed with getting it right, then expanding from there. It was so much time, and there were so many times I was incredibly frustrated — I don’t know if it was Claude or users dropping off, but I seemed to have the best success from about 7 p.m. to midnight. That’s when things would just work — every idea, every iteration, it just clicked, and I’d think, yes, we’re gaining ground — let’s add this to the skill and build from there.

So much of what you and I are talking about, I put in hundreds of hours of just figuring it out by doing it wrong first. The most important part is patience and discipline — had I not had the patience, I would have thrown in the towel a long time ago.

[24:55] Megan Porta

Yeah. So if somebody wants to get started with an endeavor like this, what do you recommend? Patience, perseverance, all of that — but where do you start with AI? Just start having the conversation? Are there any points to be sure to include when you’re having that conversation?

[25:18] Jason Decker

Great questions. When it comes to learning AI, it’s really just jumping in the deep end of the pool. Like I told you, April 1st of this year was my first class — I knew nothing. I wanted to learn about it because I was around during the dot-com/dot-bomb era, and it’s interesting — the classes I went to, and I’m the kind of person who looks for trends, the median age was probably 55. I went to two online classes and one in-person class, and without a doubt, the people in them were older.

One thing I also do now is offer a service to help people who’ve gone through an audit and need help bridging the gap, so they don’t have to go through the hundred-plus hours of building out all the AI systems themselves. That’s what I offer as a service now, because it worked for mine — being able to link everything up to another blog, using MCPs, which are terms I never imagined I’d be speaking to this day. All these things I learned — how to automate, how to write code. I didn’t know any of this stuff, but to solve the problems I had, I ended up learning it.

[27:05] Megan Porta

Yeah, and you never could have done all of this a couple of years ago — it would have been impossible. Like you said, you would have had to invest six figures or more just to get help, and it would have taken forever to get it all done.

[27:20] Jason Decker

Easily. Yeah, you’re a hundred percent right — and I’m probably being conservative on six figures. That’s definitely the size of investment I would have had to make to get the blog done.

[27:28] Megan Porta

Yeah, absolutely — a huge investment.

I have a question about your E-E-A-T — sorry, I think our connection dropped for a second — are you there? I was just curious, because your blog is This Silly Girl’s Kitchen, and you’re obviously not a girl. So how has that gone, transferring it over to a dude?

[27:58] Jason Decker

Yeah, I’m here — the last thing I heard was “E-E-A-T.”

Well, that’s been the fun part — having my daughters involved. Maddie and I, that was the be-all end-all. That’s why I did this in the first place — I wanted to bridge my relationship with my daughters, and having them involved… another big area of opportunity we saw was on the social media side, because Dana originally was doing tons of videos and then stopped for a couple of years. So we came in, did the social media, created videos, started putting them on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, and used that to draw more traffic to the website, plus Pinterest. That was a big part of why we bought it.

So from an E-E-A-T standpoint, I’ve got my daughters there. And the good part is — I was a line cook back in college. I’m not a chef, I’m not going to pretend to be one.

[31:46] Megan Porta

Hi — sorry, just a little intermission there. So, we were talking about the E-E-A-T and your daughters, and how that’s bridged everything so well. Do you feel like Google has understood that, so everything’s smooth there?

[32:10] Jason Decker

I think it’s improved, but that’s part of why I’m here. What I can tell you is that from a content standpoint, with the May 25th update, we definitely took a hit. And then on the spam update too, because I did close to 1,500 blog posts and made them uniform to exactly what Casey wanted — so we took a hit there. The flip side is we were able to make up a lot of the drop we had from Google search, at least up front, because I know we’ll rebound — a lot of it’s being replaced by social. So our numbers went down on the Google side, but they’re going up on the social side.

I have no doubt our Google numbers will go up too, because when I was doing the blog post rebuild slowly, we were making good, steady ground — up considerably, double digits in Google. It wasn’t until I did 926 posts in June — and again, much like everything I’ve learned in this business — I just went in and ran hard, wanted to get as many done as possible. And in one sense, yes, they’re all done, but the flip side is, talking with Casey, we probably took a hit because so many of the posts came out looking exactly the same.

[34:06] Megan Porta

Right, I was going to ask that too — Google has to be a little confused, like, whoa, what’s going on with this site, that’s a lot of changes happening, right?

[34:19] Jason Decker

I learned many valuable lessons through this. They love the updates, but like I said, when I did it at scale, I definitely felt a hit. Slowly, Google will have me back in its good graces. What I can tell you is the content is definitely liked, because our numbers across Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo have gone up — I mean, through the roof. I was shocked — like a thousand percent, every single month for the last couple of months, they’ve kept going up and up. So I know the content is liked, and once Google catches up with social and the other search engines, it’s really going to be fun to watch it take off. And then there are also the citations we’re getting in AI —

Taking a look at Copilot, we’re starting to get cited a lot there. I’m excited to be across all the models — one of the big things Casey recommends is having AI buttons on your site, which we have, and we’re starting to see the benefits of that.

[35:43] Megan Porta

Yeah, that’s great. I just had a question — no, go ahead.

[35:47] Jason Decker

I forgot about this too — go ahead. No — what ended up happening is, yes, our number of views went down, but our average position went from about 15 to around 8.1. We got a significant increase in the value of our traffic because of the changes we made on those blog posts. So once it all catches up — kick the doors down.

[36:30] Megan Porta

That’s great. Well, that’s so great — so your work is paying off, and now you’re just waiting for the dust to settle a little bit. Do you have any advice for people who are considering purchasing a food blog versus starting a new one?

[36:47] Jason Decker

Yeah — go all in. Figure out your why, and find the one that fits what you want to do. Starting one is great, because you know everything about it. But if you want to buy one, the nice part is, if you dig in and really embrace the recipes, the process, the pictures, and what it takes to bring a blog post to life — that creative part is the most fun, in my opinion, period. Getting on and doing the videos is a blast. So when you have a site that’s already up and running, that helps too, because if you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of money, buying a site that’s already making money — and having someone like Casey do an audit, and then reaching out to me to automate that audit — you can really turbocharge a blog so it starts making money for you quickly.

[37:57] Megan Porta

So how do people hire you if they’re interested in getting help with this?

[38:03] Jason Decker

They can reach out to me through This Silly Girl’s Kitchen, the website, or any of the social media channels — or give me a call, I’m happy to help out, or if you just want to bounce ideas around. I love helping people. This journey has helped me so much — I’ve learned so much, and it’s been a complete blessing.

[38:30] Megan Porta

Any final words, Jason? I’m so impressed with your story and what you’ve done in less than a year — it’s crazy, it’s insane, but so cool.

[38:42] Jason Decker

Yes, Megan, insane is the correct word — if you’d told me on January 21st that you and I would be having this conversation, I would have told you you’re nuts. Absolutely nuts. But again, it’s amazing what we do when we have problems, what we do to solve them. I’ve learned so much, I’ve gotten such an education, and God has taken me through this — my relationships with my daughters are the best they’ve ever been. I’ve got my dad judging some of the contests, my mom’s judged them too — it’s becoming a family affair.

[39:20] Megan Porta

That’s great — that’s so great. It’s pulling everyone in, not just your daughters, but your whole family together, it sounds like. That’s really cool.

[39:32] Jason Decker

Yeah, my dad — we call him Grumpy Gramps — he brings that personality out, and it’s just fun. Every bit of it’s fun.

[39:53] Megan Porta

Wow. All right, well, thank you for sharing this. Any final words of wisdom before we say goodbye, Jason? This has been a pleasure.

[39:53] Jason Decker

Yeah — nothing happens to you, everything happens for you. Period. That was the biggest lesson I’ve learned — every obstacle I’ve had, I’ve asked God, okay, what am I supposed to learn here? Once I focus on that, things open up, solutions come, and everything works out, as opposed to asking why is this happening to me. It’s not happening to me, it’s happening for me. I’ve learned so much, which is why I created this automation — I’d love to help as many people as I can, because when people get Casey’s audits and look at them, they’re daunting. I can help take care of those quickly — the blog posts, the internal linking, all of it — because through AI and the process I’ve built, I’d love to help as many people as I can.

[40:52] Megan Porta

Amazing — so, This Silly Girl’s Kitchen…

[40:54] Jason Decker

And Megan, thank you for having me. I’m incredibly blessed.

[40:58] Megan Porta

Well, of course — it was such a pleasure to meet you and hear your story. I know all my listeners will be as impressed as I am. So thank you for sharing this, and thanks for listening, food bloggers. I’ll see you next time.

[41:14] Jason Decker

Sounds great.